Plague land

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Robin Blake

The year is 1740. Geroge II is on the throne but England's remoter provinces remain largely a law unto thenselves. In Lancashire a grim discovery has been made: a squire's wife, Doleres Brockletower, lies in the woods near her home, Garlick Hall, her throat brutally slashed. called to the scene Coroner Titus Cragg finds the Brockletower household awash with rumour and suspicion. He enlists the help of his astute young friend, doctor Luke Fidelis, to throw light on the case. But this is a world in which forensic science is in its infancy, and policing hardly exisits. Embarking on thier first gripping investigation, Cragg and Fidelis are faced with superstition of witnesses, obstruction by local offcials, and denuciations from the squire himself.

Sample

Robin Blake

"Blake continues the series Booklist calls "a solid winner" with a darkly rich mystery centered on an apparent suicide that leads Cragg and Fidelis down a treacherous path.The year is 1742, and the people of Preston are looking forward to their ancient once-every-twenty-years festival of merriment and excess, the Preston Guild. But the prospect darkens as the town plunges into a financial crisis caused by the death of pawnbroker and would-be banker Philip Pimbo, shot behind the locked door of his office. Is it suicide? Coroner Titus Cragg suspects so, but Dr Luke Fidelis disagrees. To untangle the truth Cragg must dig out the secrets of Pimbo's personal life, learn the grim facts of the African slave trade, search for a missing Civil War treasure and deal with the machinations of his old enemy Ephraim Grimshaw, now the town's mayor. Cragg relies once again on the help and advice of his analytical friend Fidelis, his astute wife Elizabeth and the contents of a well-stocked library.As in his previous Cragg and Fidelis stories, Robin Blake brings a vivid cast of characters to the page in this third historical mystery about the dramas that breeds below the surface of life in a provincial Georgian town."--

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Martin Davies

Havana in the 1850s is a city as dangerous as it is exotic. The murder of a humble night watchman at the British Consulate seems to worry neither the Consul nor the police. But one person cared for the old man. The enigmatic courtesan Leonarda will not rest until she understands the mystery of his death. In wintry England, George Backhouse is plucked from obscurity in the Foreign Office and given an unexpected promotion. His task: to travel to Cuba and take a stand against the illegal slave trade still flourishing there. But Havana is a tinderbox of intrigue. As the great powers of the region conspire against each other with increasing ruthlessness for control of the island, Backhouse comes to see that the most innocent of actions could spark a devastating war. To protect their interests, the powers-that-be in Whitehall are prepared to turn a blind eye to many things. Leonarda will not. But what of George Backhouse?

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D.E. Meredith

When a glamorous woman is found murdered at the peak of London's mid-nineteenth-century craze for collecting unusual specimens, Adolphus Hatton and his morgue assistant uncover murders connected to a packet of seditious letters.